The government would treat it just like any other case, even with such a facebook group.
It never ceases to amaze me how the government uses high-profile cases to grab at power and suppress the people while having their whole-hearted support of such measures. The patriot act comes to mind. (Which, btw, did nothing to stop Nidal Hasan from killing people.)
These type of things shows you the true stripes of those in power, and who should be voted out ASAP.
Download speeds don't increase all that fast. Neither are hard drives, at least compared to the earlier part of the decade.
Maybe, they think, if they can jack up the size enough - perhaps with HVD next - that they can outrun the downloaders just though the sheer size of the data? Maybe that's why the music industry tried to push DVD-As and SACDs in 1999/2000 as well.
Idk.
If blu-ray was backwards compatible like HD-DVD was (you could play one side in a DVD player), I would be encourage to get it. But as it is, I'm at the good enough stage. The next format will probably be downloadable, the era of physical formats are dying slowly, and while that won't stop releases on current formats, it will really hamper new ones from emerging.
I was going to say. Avatar, most expensive film, was just over 300 million. And that led by James Cameron, someone well known and respected. And 10+ years ago, they had waterworld, most expensive at $180 million by Kevin Costner, and they were crapping their pants.
No way they'd give an unknown 300 million for something that vaguely resembles transformers/independence day. It's a decent film and all, but.
I also get tired of films "costing" $300, or there was a story of a decent zombie flick costing $70. Maybe it started with Blair Witch costing around $10,000 for this race to the bottom - but a house built with donated labor and materials by Habitat for Humanity isn't just a $500 project just because $500 was stuck into it by the end producers - it took more than $500 of resources even if said economic resources were given away that one time and that's obvious with this film as well. Just the computer work alone, unless time costs $0.
Pop-up blocker used to be good enough. Not anymore.
This year, specifically the last 6 months, ads have been rethought and changed, often hijacked the browsing experience in a way a pop-up block just can't help.
I often watch a video, like the daily show, and now there is a 30 second advertising in the beginning of it. No way to get around it. Not relevant to my interests. And if I watch it multiple times it's the same thing, over and over again. And is a 45 second clip worth a 30 second ad? Probably not.
Many articles, despite being littered with ads, now also have an advert that blocks the entire page until you view it for 30 seconds or hit "skip the ad" (who knows how long that will be voluntary).
Pandora, an excellent service, really started pushing the ads. Now, I could upgrade for $36 a year (didn't it used to be $29?) and that's all fine and good, but I could let a string of decent/good songs play on it ad free, but as soon as thumb-down a piece of music, which I do at least 50% of the time, they play an ad. Not really giving them an incentive to play my tastes now, does it, when they get rewarded with advertising for playing all the wrong songs.
Youtube really has stumbled on something elegant recently, with the music videos and AMVs and fanmade music videos recently. Sometime this year, they silenced all the things that had infringing content - in conjunction with the RIAA. It played the video, but had no sound. But apparently youtube acquired or is using something like Shazam, to listen to the clips and link it to the relevant music piece. Now almost every music video or AMV or whatnot has a transparent bar on the bottom that lets you buy that exact piece of music automatically from amazon or itunes - truly an elegant and helpful system, advertising exactly as it should be. Youtube makes a few cents, music makes it's money, the people putting together the AMVs are happy, and the audience is served.
I really have to hand it to youtube here. But the rise in unavoidable and intrusive ads otherwise has me shiver about the future of the internet.
Honestly, I think this is one of their moments. Considering the Draconian punishments in most other civilized countries for copyright infringement, this is very reasonable. 3 warnings, then you go to jail and at most have to pay 15,000... which is about 1/100th of what US courts are handing out?
I read the article and all it specifies is for "copying material". Does that mean uploading, or also downloading, or what? What if it is for downloading?
We have become so accustomed to think copyrighted material = songs or movies. How many times do we stop to think that web page we're looking at, with 20 different.gifs or.jpegs might be a violation? Are those lolcat pictures properly licensed? If I email a few, will I be in violation of the distribution part?
And what about text?
This is what is so insane of copyright, and specifically of criminalizing it. Because it makes 99.999% of the populace guilty, and then it's purely up to the state to use it on a person when they feel like it. 3 strikes and you're out of you mind if you think this is a fair deal. Fuck you, I'd rather live in a free and open society, not one where the next step is to consider libraries copyright thieves for providing a copymachine near the books.
Honestly, this legislation is but a foot in the door. MPAA and RIAA rather not waste their own resources with civil trials, they'd rather waste the taxpayer's resources to prosecute people and put the fear in them, the populace's own money used against them. What a load.
The more the government tightens its grip, the more stagnant the economomy becomes. I believe they'll only push digital cash if the government can tax every red cent that it can. They first came for the gold in the 1930s and what was left were fiat greenbacks.
Now all that will be left are binary 1s and 0s?
Don't sign me up. I'll deal with the hassles of cash, thank you very much.
Oh, and replace the ridiculous and costly-to-administer-and-enforce tax system with something sane: http://www.apttax.com/
Canada, France, and Britain are also models. Are their standards of living good enough? Moore was showcasing Cuba in a more sarcastic way "Even these guys have it!"
I'd much rather just have intelligent TVs or receivers that turned the volume down upon detecting a commercial...based on the settings *I* want, not what the government thinks is best for me.
Wait, the goverment says to network or whoever "Hey, make the commercials the same volume as the program" and you are complaining that the government isn't allowing you a choice? They are the one in this case trying to protect your choice of volume level!
And sorry, forcing everyone to buy a new TV for a feature when the government can implement for essentially free for everyone and at no real cost to any party involved is being technologically elitist and if you don't see how the corps just love your "solution" to death...
I take care of an elderly parent, when the commercial starts blaring at a normal volume, it is very annoying, at their volume, it's painful.
Freedom of Speech is a negative right - congress can't restrict it. But they're not obliged to give you a tongue if you were born without on. They don't need to give you a podium either or force private 3rd parties to do so. FoS merely prohibits the government taking unreasonable actions against you.
A freedom like (access to) electricity is more like granting monopoly rights to a company in exchange for universal service. It's not a right to free electricity, merely access to electricity. Companies often have rights of way and such things, and it wouldn't do to have them monopolize an area and then decide to service only the more profitable half but block any competors from coming in. The common good - which is in the Constitution.
My music usually doesn't surprise me with sudden shifts of maximum volume. But every time a program switches to commercial on TV, the max volume is a shit load louder and with more commercials than ever before that means fiddling with the remote every other minute. It wasn't always this way and is way annoying.
That said, there are benefits to representative democracies that are lost in a direct democracy. But I wouldn't go so far as to categorically state that representative democracies are always better. For one, it's much easier to bribe one representatives than everyone of his/her constituents.
But that bribery exists on many times over. Bribing constituents have been happening for a long time. It's called farm subsidies, social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, etcetera.
It has happened time and again that parties play to the fears of constituents being paid off that the other party will take away that money. Social Security and the elderly voting block is a great example of this.
And it's particularly relevant as this country heads into bankruptcy in the coming years, it will be Medicare and Social Security Spending that does us in, with interest payments on debt being in 3rd place.
he UI would be fine if a) it worked correctly cross-browser, or at least among standards-compliant browsers...
Here are my problems with the UI. Years ago, if I was writing a comment and I wasn't logged in, it was no big deal because the anonymous comments had a log-in option; now I have log-in clicking a link - opening it in a new window or tab if I don't want to lose what I wrote.
My second problem are the sliders near the top to control comments. I have no clue how these stupid things work. When I'm logged-in, I get these nice drop-down boxes that have a comment threshhold (5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, -1) and whether the comments should be nested or presented another way. When I'm logged out, it's some stupid horizontal slider thingy that I have no clue how to operate. Perhap what I'm presented when I logged-in is a holdover and a preference set in my account that the newer members don't have (Idk) but it's how I remember the site since I joined. Ever since then, they've been experimenting with some new system ever other year or so that's just makes it less and less usable imo.
I don't think I'm too set in my ways, I moved from different webmail clients to gmail because of UI improvements, but they were fast and intuitive (new yahoo mail sucked worse than classic though).
I've seen the most intelligent comments get buried to negative infinitey on digg simply because they went against the prevailing group think at the moment. Not so much here.
And you're correct, every UI change here has been an unimprovement.
Idk, do you really expect any internet service to hold to their stated privacy policy? Yes, they may, or when the feds come a knockin', they might have not and the logs are chock full of stuff. Without a paying customer relationship, it's my understanding that it's pretty hard to have any enforceable reconcilation if they breach their word.
Considering that most browsers have a search bar, it would be nice if the browser could somehow implement anonymizing techniques independent of the specific search engine. Hell, charge money for it as a value-added service to route the search requests through their anonymizing server, which they promise not to log, for the paranoid user. I'd feel a lot better doing that than using some dubious Tor node.
1. This isn't the role of government. 2. No matter how much the apologists bray, the fact is that Windows has the most infections. The proof is in the pudding! Yes, user stupidity contributes to that... but it ignores deep design flaws in Windows itself! Will the infections ever go toward zero even with the best designs but dumbest users? No. But it sure doesn't excuse it being in the other extreme for Windows.
This is supported behind the scenes by the battery industry. Several years back, a phone that couldn't last one week would be viewed as kinda week, smartphones put that limit down to a day with real use, and of course, this virtualization will be completely useless for most people, but they'll accept having to charge the phone every 6 hours now. So instead of replacing a battery every 2 years, it'll go through all of expected lifecycle in 3 months. Profit! $$$
Should always maintain your innocence in these type of cases because the guilty plea will haunt you the rest of your life. 3.5 years is still ridiculous.
Open source phones will take off. They will take off when someone delivers a model that uses a mesh network to render the existing carriers obsolete, at which point most of the existing carriers will go out of business. Pretty obvious if you think about it.
We don't even have mesh internet yet.... and that would be infinitely easier - you could have driving cars with their antennas act at mesh points... (Please don't bring up OLPC.)
The problem with any mesh network is to get decent latency, there eventually has to be a big local pipe that acts as a pipe so your message doesn't have to bounce around a million different devices (not that TCP/IP even allows that AFAIK, believe their self-destruct counter runs down from 256 max IIRC). Back to square one - someone always has to buy a connection for the rest of the mooches, dole out bandwidth, and all that. As well as deal with legal hassles.
Slashdot Mirror
The government would treat it just like any other case, even with such a facebook group.
It never ceases to amaze me how the government uses high-profile cases to grab at power and suppress the people while having their whole-hearted support of such measures. The patriot act comes to mind. (Which, btw, did nothing to stop Nidal Hasan from killing people.)
These type of things shows you the true stripes of those in power, and who should be voted out ASAP.
Download speeds don't increase all that fast. Neither are hard drives, at least compared to the earlier part of the decade.
Maybe, they think, if they can jack up the size enough - perhaps with HVD next - that they can outrun the downloaders just though the sheer size of the data? Maybe that's why the music industry tried to push DVD-As and SACDs in 1999/2000 as well.
Idk.
If blu-ray was backwards compatible like HD-DVD was (you could play one side in a DVD player), I would be encourage to get it. But as it is, I'm at the good enough stage. The next format will probably be downloadable, the era of physical formats are dying slowly, and while that won't stop releases on current formats, it will really hamper new ones from emerging.
I was going to say. Avatar, most expensive film, was just over 300 million. And that led by James Cameron, someone well known and respected. And 10+ years ago, they had waterworld, most expensive at $180 million by Kevin Costner, and they were crapping their pants.
No way they'd give an unknown 300 million for something that vaguely resembles transformers/independence day. It's a decent film and all, but.
I also get tired of films "costing" $300, or there was a story of a decent zombie flick costing $70. Maybe it started with Blair Witch costing around $10,000 for this race to the bottom - but a house built with donated labor and materials by Habitat for Humanity isn't just a $500 project just because $500 was stuck into it by the end producers - it took more than $500 of resources even if said economic resources were given away that one time and that's obvious with this film as well. Just the computer work alone, unless time costs $0.
And not even the default option. If you're subscribing to a specific twit, you shouldn't be surprised by their language.
I don't expect Highlight Magazine if I subscribe to Hustler, why should twitter be any different?
Pop-up blocker used to be good enough. Not anymore.
This year, specifically the last 6 months, ads have been rethought and changed, often hijacked the browsing experience in a way a pop-up block just can't help.
I often watch a video, like the daily show, and now there is a 30 second advertising in the beginning of it. No way to get around it. Not relevant to my interests. And if I watch it multiple times it's the same thing, over and over again. And is a 45 second clip worth a 30 second ad? Probably not.
Many articles, despite being littered with ads, now also have an advert that blocks the entire page until you view it for 30 seconds or hit "skip the ad" (who knows how long that will be voluntary).
Pandora, an excellent service, really started pushing the ads. Now, I could upgrade for $36 a year (didn't it used to be $29?) and that's all fine and good, but I could let a string of decent/good songs play on it ad free, but as soon as thumb-down a piece of music, which I do at least 50% of the time, they play an ad. Not really giving them an incentive to play my tastes now, does it, when they get rewarded with advertising for playing all the wrong songs.
Youtube really has stumbled on something elegant recently, with the music videos and AMVs and fanmade music videos recently. Sometime this year, they silenced all the things that had infringing content - in conjunction with the RIAA. It played the video, but had no sound. But apparently youtube acquired or is using something like Shazam, to listen to the clips and link it to the relevant music piece. Now almost every music video or AMV or whatnot has a transparent bar on the bottom that lets you buy that exact piece of music automatically from amazon or itunes - truly an elegant and helpful system, advertising exactly as it should be. Youtube makes a few cents, music makes it's money, the people putting together the AMVs are happy, and the audience is served.
I really have to hand it to youtube here. But the rise in unavoidable and intrusive ads otherwise has me shiver about the future of the internet.
I read the article and all it specifies is for "copying material". Does that mean uploading, or also downloading, or what? What if it is for downloading?
We have become so accustomed to think copyrighted material = songs or movies. How many times do we stop to think that web page we're looking at, with 20 different .gifs or .jpegs might be a violation? Are those lolcat pictures properly licensed? If I email a few, will I be in violation of the distribution part?
And what about text?
This is what is so insane of copyright, and specifically of criminalizing it. Because it makes 99.999% of the populace guilty, and then it's purely up to the state to use it on a person when they feel like it. 3 strikes and you're out of you mind if you think this is a fair deal. Fuck you, I'd rather live in a free and open society, not one where the next step is to consider libraries copyright thieves for providing a copymachine near the books.
Honestly, this legislation is but a foot in the door. MPAA and RIAA rather not waste their own resources with civil trials, they'd rather waste the taxpayer's resources to prosecute people and put the fear in them, the populace's own money used against them. What a load.
No.
The more the government tightens its grip, the more stagnant the economomy becomes. I believe they'll only push digital cash if the government can tax every red cent that it can. They first came for the gold in the 1930s and what was left were fiat greenbacks.
Now all that will be left are binary 1s and 0s?
Don't sign me up. I'll deal with the hassles of cash, thank you very much.
Oh, and replace the ridiculous and costly-to-administer-and-enforce tax system with something sane:
http://www.apttax.com/
Canada, France, and Britain are also models. Are their standards of living good enough? Moore was showcasing Cuba in a more sarcastic way "Even these guys have it!"
Though communism is evil I agree.
Idk if pagers are more reliable or what not, but this single web page we are on here is way more than 25k characters. Just a thought...
Wait, the goverment says to network or whoever "Hey, make the commercials the same volume as the program" and you are complaining that the government isn't allowing you a choice? They are the one in this case trying to protect your choice of volume level!
And sorry, forcing everyone to buy a new TV for a feature when the government can implement for essentially free for everyone and at no real cost to any party involved is being technologically elitist and if you don't see how the corps just love your "solution" to death...
I take care of an elderly parent, when the commercial starts blaring at a normal volume, it is very annoying, at their volume, it's painful.
Freedom of Speech is a negative right - congress can't restrict it. But they're not obliged to give you a tongue if you were born without on. They don't need to give you a podium either or force private 3rd parties to do so. FoS merely prohibits the government taking unreasonable actions against you.
A freedom like (access to) electricity is more like granting monopoly rights to a company in exchange for universal service. It's not a right to free electricity, merely access to electricity. Companies often have rights of way and such things, and it wouldn't do to have them monopolize an area and then decide to service only the more profitable half but block any competors from coming in. The common good - which is in the Constitution.
My music usually doesn't surprise me with sudden shifts of maximum volume. But every time a program switches to commercial on TV, the max volume is a shit load louder and with more commercials than ever before that means fiddling with the remote every other minute. It wasn't always this way and is way annoying.
But that bribery exists on many times over. Bribing constituents have been happening for a long time. It's called farm subsidies, social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, etcetera.
It has happened time and again that parties play to the fears of constituents being paid off that the other party will take away that money. Social Security and the elderly voting block is a great example of this.
And it's particularly relevant as this country heads into bankruptcy in the coming years, it will be Medicare and Social Security Spending that does us in, with interest payments on debt being in 3rd place.
You know, for Border Guard?
Here are my problems with the UI. Years ago, if I was writing a comment and I wasn't logged in, it was no big deal because the anonymous comments had a log-in option; now I have log-in clicking a link - opening it in a new window or tab if I don't want to lose what I wrote.
My second problem are the sliders near the top to control comments. I have no clue how these stupid things work. When I'm logged-in, I get these nice drop-down boxes that have a comment threshhold (5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, -1) and whether the comments should be nested or presented another way. When I'm logged out, it's some stupid horizontal slider thingy that I have no clue how to operate. Perhap what I'm presented when I logged-in is a holdover and a preference set in my account that the newer members don't have (Idk) but it's how I remember the site since I joined. Ever since then, they've been experimenting with some new system ever other year or so that's just makes it less and less usable imo.
I don't think I'm too set in my ways, I moved from different webmail clients to gmail because of UI improvements, but they were fast and intuitive (new yahoo mail sucked worse than classic though).
Digg is direct democracy, Slashdot is a republic.
I've seen the most intelligent comments get buried to negative infinitey on digg simply because they went against the prevailing group think at the moment. Not so much here.
And you're correct, every UI change here has been an unimprovement.
Idk, do you really expect any internet service to hold to their stated privacy policy? Yes, they may, or when the feds come a knockin', they might have not and the logs are chock full of stuff. Without a paying customer relationship, it's my understanding that it's pretty hard to have any enforceable reconcilation if they breach their word.
Considering that most browsers have a search bar, it would be nice if the browser could somehow implement anonymizing techniques independent of the specific search engine. Hell, charge money for it as a value-added service to route the search requests through their anonymizing server, which they promise not to log, for the paranoid user. I'd feel a lot better doing that than using some dubious Tor node.
If you are talking about wiring, aluminum is reasonably plentiful and conductiveand was used in the past.
Sounds like the geocities of this decade.
1. This isn't the role of government.
2. No matter how much the apologists bray, the fact is that Windows has the most infections. The proof is in the pudding! Yes, user stupidity contributes to that... but it ignores deep design flaws in Windows itself! Will the infections ever go toward zero even with the best designs but dumbest users? No. But it sure doesn't excuse it being in the other extreme for Windows.
This is supported behind the scenes by the battery industry. Several years back, a phone that couldn't last one week would be viewed as kinda week, smartphones put that limit down to a day with real use, and of course, this virtualization will be completely useless for most people, but they'll accept having to charge the phone every 6 hours now. So instead of replacing a battery every 2 years, it'll go through all of expected lifecycle in 3 months. Profit! $$$
(I can't think of any other reason...)
I just took a look at that monkey attack lady that appeared on Oprah, did I just create demand for more monkey attacks on people?
Oh and the advice of going to the FBI is stupid. Don't talk to the police!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
Should always maintain your innocence in these type of cases because the guilty plea will haunt you the rest of your life. 3.5 years is still ridiculous.
We don't even have mesh internet yet.... and that would be infinitely easier - you could have driving cars with their antennas act at mesh points... (Please don't bring up OLPC.)
The problem with any mesh network is to get decent latency, there eventually has to be a big local pipe that acts as a pipe so your message doesn't have to bounce around a million different devices (not that TCP/IP even allows that AFAIK, believe their self-destruct counter runs down from 256 max IIRC). Back to square one - someone always has to buy a connection for the rest of the mooches, dole out bandwidth, and all that. As well as deal with legal hassles.